What is Coding?
In this article, I will talk about coding and my experience with learning from Codecademy and comparison to other platforms.
Coding + Academy = Codecademy
Codecademy is a website that provides lessons in learning about coding and many other courses. I took my time in learning about HTML and its importance. I will list a few things that I learned from this course and later on how this compares to the other platforms that I tried. In addition, I will explain the importance of coding.
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, what HTML does is it provides structure to the content appearing on the website, such as images, text, or videos. Learning HTML is one of the first steps into creating a website.
The image above was taken from the course and explains how HTML works.
- Element: HTML document formed from tags and the text it contains
- Opening Tag: this tag is used to start the HTML element
- Content: this can be some sort of text or media that you want to display, this is surrounded by the opening and closing tags
- Closing Tag: this tag is used to end the HTML element
Having a body element is important because this is what will be displayed on the screen. For example, look at the exercise they had us perform:
The box on the left is what I input using the HTML element like I have said, and the box on the right displays what it will look like in a website. The body element can have what they call a child and grandchildren has you can put elements within other elements as we can see in the picture below:
There are so many types of tags that you can input to have simple displays on your website such as headings. Headings are used very commonly in articles and if you haven't noticed by now, I used headings. However, to make headings for a website has a lot more to it then pressing enter and using the heading font size, here is another picture from my lesson:
Codecademy is a cool website since it's very interactive and you can actually see why you have to input certain things to display the content properly. Codecademy is where you can learn how to start from scratch but there are other websites that help you out even more.
Other Platforms
WordPress can help you create a website, that ask you what the website is for, let's you create your URL. Here are some of plans that you can have:
After you select one (I picked student because I'm very tight on money and not to mention I am student so I have no serious reason to use this site just yet), your website has been made! You can click to make a post and this is what it looks like:
As you can see, you can make headers and body paragraphs without the need of a HTML tag and such. In fact, the blog posts that you can make here is similar to the LinkedIn's blog post, very simplistic and easy to use.
Next up is Squarespace, this is another platform where you can create your own website. There are many website designs you can have and different themes.
Codecademy, WordPress, or Squarespace... why not all?
Coding is important for any creation to the websites, it is a necessary skill to have especially if you want to start from scratch and not have a website made through another website. Most businesses want to establish a online presence so besides creating social media accounts, they should obtain a website.
However, the use of these service websites are helpful for small businesses or those that don't have time. A digital marketer can use all three because you can advertise to each audience since sometimes the websites don't have the same users. On WordPress, you can like other people's blog that are on there and keep track of the blogs you want to be notified on.
Coding is important for many business and personally for me, I had a lot of fun coding a fake website for my lessons. So, if you think you are "tech savvy" enough, try to learn how to code!